Why is Square Enix so lazy with making weapons lately?

[Iscah]

It's not just crafted Primal Weapons. It's the Weapons and Armor for this entire Expansion. I was looking at Vpr and Pct, and their literally reusing crafted weapons with other crafted weapons. Same with their armor. The level 89 gear you pick up in Old sharlayan, is the exact same model and texture as the starting gear you get. It's like the Devs just decided they didn't need to try anymore.

On this front, it's not different to what they've been doing all along.

Crafted gear has always been recycled gear – if you look at the RDM crafted weapons 50-60 for example, it's just two models alternating in new colour schemes each time.

The level 89 gear for PCT/VPR looks lazy on its own but it's not actually a loss, just a missed opportunity to do something interesting but unprecedented.

If you look across all of the jobs, none of them have ever received unique job gear at their middle stages: you get generic crafted gear at level 50 for DRK/AST/MCH, no level 60 gear for RDM/SAM, no level 70 for GNB/DNC, and then the 79 gear for RPR/SGE just went the same route as 89 with a copy of the starter gear – they're really just doing it to ensure that all jobs are going into the final zone with equal gear strength.

I do wish they had put some effort into picking out an additional set of gear to fill this middle-stage gap for each job – recycled models would be fine, just use the opportunity to give people access to some "would be perfect for this job if it wasn't role-locked to something else" stuff. I had made a thread to that effect at some point around Shadowbringers, when the jobs were just getting nothing at all in the middle stage, but my hope for it died when Endwalker filled the gap with exact-duplicate rather than new gear.